" Oh, I know I'm not nearly good enough for you."
" Good enough for me, dear?
" They all told me so, and they were right ! Why,
even the American minister said it. Everybody thinks
it."
"Why, aren 't they wretches To think of them
saying such a thing! As if-as if anybody could be
too--"
" Do you know-" She paused and looked at
him with a certain timid challenge. " I don't know
why I feel it, but-sometimes I feel that I've been
I've been flung at your head."
He opened his mouth in astonishment. " Flung at
my head!
She held up her finger. "And if I thought you
could ever believe it ! "
" Is a girl flung at a man's head when her father
carries her thousands of miles away and the man
follows her all these miles, and at last-"
" Her eyes were shining. "And you really came to
Greece-on purpose to-to-"
" Confess you knew it all the time! Confess!"
The answer was muffled. " Well, sometimes I
thought you did, and at other times I thought you-
didn't."
In a secluded cove, in which the sea-maids once had
played, no doubt, Marjory and Coleman sat in silence.
He was below her, and if he looked at her he had to
turn his glance obliquely upward. She was staring at
the sea with woman's mystic gaze, a gaze which men
at once reverence and fear since it seems to look into
the deep, simple heart of nature, and men begin to feel
that their petty wisdoms are futile to control these
strange spirits, as wayward as nature and as pure as
nature, wild as the play of waves, sometimes as unalterable
as the mountain amid the winds; and to
measure them, man must perforce use a mathematical
formula.
He wished that she would lay her hand upon his
hair. He would be happy then. If she would only,
of her own will, touch his hair lightly with her
fingers-if she would do it with an unconscious air it
would be even better. It would show him that she
was thinking of him, even when she did not know she
was thinking of him.
Perhaps he dared lay his head softly against her knee.
Did he dare?
As his head touched her knee, she did not move.
She seemed to be still gazing at the sea. Presently
idly caressing fingers played in his hair near the
forehead. He looked up suddenly lifting his arms.
He breathed out a cry which was laden with a kind of
diffident ferocity. " I haven't kissed you yet-"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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